Antibiotics used in animal feed or to treat farm animals, such as dairy and beef cattle and swine, occasionally contaminate the food supply. The hazards associated with these undesirable residues include allergic reactions, propagation of resistant organisms and other long-term health risks. As a result, government agencies such as the United States Department of Agriculture and the United States Food and Drug Administration require monitoring of such residues in foods. Foods such as milk, meat, poultry, seafood and animal feed are routinely tested for the presence of such residues. We disclose herein a user-friendly method for detecting a variety of residues in a single, broad-spectrum test.
Various animal parts and excretions can be tested for the presence of antibiotics. Tests for antibiotics in kidney include tests for hog kidney and veal bob kidney. Problems with some of the available tests, particularly in the pork industry, include sensitivities that do not match well with governmental or industry limits. Some tests are over-sensitive to certain antibiotics and under-sensitive to others.
Sensitivities of currently available microbial growth inhibition tests, are based primarily on parameters that affect test sensitivity to all drugs. Such parameters include growth organism used, amount or concentration of growth organism used, vessel dimensions, media volume, media type, mix of nutrients, incubation time and temperature. As a result, if a test is adequately sensitive to some drugs, but overly sensitive to other drugs, other methods for sensitivity adjustment may be needed.
Another problem with some tests is that they may require cumbersome extraction procedures or use of organic solvents that must be removed from the sample prior to test operation. This adds a cumbersome procedural step. Some tests are also procedurally cumbersome, requiring incubation of a sample swab on a lawn of bacterial culture and inoculation of an agar surface with spores just prior to running the test.
In addition to problems with slow testing time, over-sensitivity, under-sensitivity and extraction, none of the currently available tests are provided in an all-in-one format in which all test reagents and sampling devices are provided in one test instrument.